Doris Ferleger

EMERGENCY

I love the word emergency.
Its redness, its lack of eventuality, its flash and crime. 

Its brothers—burn and rope. 
I love the way humans startle, the jerk back 

of the body, the lunge forward. 
No sideways movements come with emergency. 

No rhythmic beat or brush of drum begins it. 
Always the rigid riot. 

Sometimes a pall of silence covers the body 
of emergency so it looks as if 

the silvery sheet, tissue light, tissue thin, 
is far less than volcanic. 

Emergency—I like the evenness 
of its four-count syllables, how it takes too long 

to say it. By the time you say fire, 
the house is rubble. By the time you say smoke, 

the eagle, the sparrow, the tit-willow—
are hollowed out, featherless.

Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of three full volumes of poetry: Big Silences in a Year of Rain (finalist for the Alice James Books/Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook entitled When You Become Snow. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, DASH Literary Journal, Delmarva Review, Euphony, Good Works Review, L.A. Review, Poet Lore, Rougarou, The Virginia Normal, Whistling Shade, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.